Broadway.com: Spamalot "a good match" for Aiken

Broadway.com caught up recently with Clay, in his third week of performances on Broadway's Spamalot. The 3 page interview has Clay talking about his role as Sir Robin, as well as providing some new insight into how radio is not influencing the production of his 3rd mainstream album, currently on track for a May release.

Here is a preview of the article... make sure you read the entire article at Broadway.com.

Everybody knows that Clay Aiken can sing, but—surprise!—he can also hold his own on a Broadway stage. To be more precise, he can hula, ogle scantily clad girls, discuss flying coconuts in a British accent, pretend to poop in his tunic, do a Cossack-style line dance and perform a lightning-fast patter song ("You won't succeed on Broadway if you don't have any Jews") without dropping a syllable. As Sir Robin in Spamalot, the 29-year-old American Idol runner-up appears perfectly at ease in the world of Monty Python—which, he recently claimed, he thought was a person until he saw the show.

The truth is, Clay is smart guy who knows what works for him, and he was shrewd enough to realize that Spamalot, in its own nutty way, would be a good match for his talents and his sunny sensibility.

How did you feel after your first Broadway performance?
I thought, "Well, thank god that's over!" [Laughs.] A lot of people had asked me if I was nervous, and I didn't know the appropriate response. I really wasn't. I don't know if that's bad—to not be nervous. Yeah, it was the first time I was doing this, but the audience thing doesn't freak me out that much. I figured I was going to screw up at some point, so there's no reason to be nervous about wondering when [laughs]. It was actually somewhat relaxing, because the rehearsals are sooo grueling. It's not just the schedule, it's all the information and learning "this that, this that, this that, this that." Having the opportunity to go out and do everything you learned was kind of refreshing and kind of nice.

Is it fun to sing the show's politically incorrect song about Broadway shows needing Jews to be a success?
You know, I'm kind of politically incorrect myself. I do worry sometimes, because it's a very fine line between humor and anti-Semitism, so I'm very careful as to how I say it. It's interesting, though—the first time I saw the show, I remember that being the song I laughed the hardest at. Every time I've seen it, it always gets the biggest laugh. I don't know that I'm doing it justice because I can't really get the audience's reaction. I'll watch other people's scenes and listen to the audience laughing and enjoying themselves, but in mine, I can't hear the audience for the amount of breathing that's going on in my ear [laughs].

What are you enjoying most about being on Broadway?
I love the people I work with. I really enjoy getting there [to the theater] and talking to them and listening to what goes on backstage. It's kind of nice to have a big group of people to work with as opposed to being by yourself [doing concerts]. I've only been doing this for three weeks, so it's still new.

How do you see your career progressing? Will you continue to do covers or record new music?
We did the cover thing last time; it's not a goal to do that again right now. Our next album is going to be all new stuff. That's kind of what I wanted to do last time and we took a detour. We're in the process of working on it. There's not horribly much to say about the next album, but we're hoping it's out in May.

Where are you on the spectrum of, say, a singer like Michael Buble vs. the kind of pop music they play on a top-40 station?
I'm not going to compare myself to anybody. I don't know that I want to be on the spectrum. I don't plan to be on the radio. I'm not cool enough to be on radio. I'm still dorky and not relevant enough to some people to be on radio, and it's not a goal of mine. We've got this amazing producer who's going to do the entire album, and one of the challenges for him has been not worrying about radio, because he's been so attuned to trying to make hits. We're like, "Uhhh, nooo," because once you try to cater to the radio stations, you stop catering to (a) the listener and (b) me. I was discussing this very thing with my executive producers the other day and we said, if you try to make the music fit what you think radio is going to want, you're going to miss the mark. But if we just go out and do what we do well, then it's going to be natural and maybe radio will like it. It's not something that I'm averse to; I would absolutely love it if it happens, but it's not something to work toward at the expense of doing what we want to do.